Kirk doesn’t wait for the mystery ship to arrive. He has teams take up positions at key points on the ship. Kirk, Sheppard, Carter, and O’Neill each lead a team. On emergency power, there’s no internal sensor grid to track intruders, so every team will be fighting blind.
The guests, meanwhile, have been confined to the guest deck. Zax does not take it well: “Am I to hide in a cupboard like a lily-livered shag-bag while these blackguards hunt me like a stag?”
“Yep, pretty much,”says Sheppard.
Then the mystery ship drops out of warp. Dark and angular, it glides over the dead Enterprise and settles above her saucer, hovering like a hawk over its prey.
For a moment, nothing happens.
Then, all across the Enterprise, the air begins to shimmer.
Columns of cold white light flare to life in darkened corridors, in an empty Ten Forward. From the columns step a squad of five soldiers, identical in matte grey armor and featureless masks, rifles already raised. They move in silence, as a single unit.
O’Neill’s team is the first to engage. Phaser beams splash harmlessly off the soldiers’ armor
O’Neill opens up with his P-90, and the bullet’s punch straight through. Two soldiers drop, and the other falls back.
“Good old bullets,”says O’Neill. “They never go out of style.”
Data reports. The beacon isn’t only calling these mercs in. It’s guiding their transporters. As long as it’s active, they can keep beaming in more squads, and the moment they find Zax, they can beam him straight out.
The mercs have the numbers, and there aren’t enough hands to do everything.
What do you do?
A) Hunt down the beacon. Send a team to find it and kill it. It’s the only way to stop the reinforcements and keep Zax from being beamed away, but it pulls people out of a fight.
B) Fall back and protect the guests. Pull every team back to the guest deck and turn it into a fortress. If the mercs can’t reach Zax, they can’t take him. But it hands them the rest of the ship.
C) Take the fight to them. Use the Jefferies tubes and service crawlways to pick off the squads one at a time. It could break them before they regroup, but it leaves the guests with almost no protection.
Choose!
Previously On Amalgaverse…
You and 19 others have been stranded in an amalgam universe of myriad SF realities. All 19 are sci-fi’s Best of the Best. And then there’s you, uniquely qualified given your encyclopedic knowledge garnered from your world where these characters, their technologies, and their stories are fiction, beloved t.v. shows you have watched time and again. Together, all 20 of you have set off on the Enterprise-D, tasked with finding a way home. On its first mission, the crew answered a distress call from a dead ship and found it was far from empty. Aboard, the away team awoke an android named Maia, discovered a “survivor” named Rhea who turned out to be something else entirely, and fought their way off as scavengers closed in. They came home to the Enterprise with two things: a new crewmember in Maia, and a fragment of the signature an entity left behind when it crossed into this reality. Colonel Carter believes it’s one piece of a much larger puzzle, and that the rest of it is still out there waiting.
For your second mission, you have elected to follow a Starfleet directive, traveling to pick up and transport Harven Zax, a dangerous intelligence broker, to a rendezvous point at the edge of the Expanse. Upon arrival, you discover his cruiser inoperable, drifting towards a black hole, the ship’s automated defense systems preventing Scotty from using the Enterprise’s transporter to simply beam them aboard.
O’Neill and Data take the jumper to the cruiser where they encounter four stranded passengers: the annoyingly flamboyant Harven Zax, his silent bodyguard Lucinda Shockley, his mild-mannered protege Milo, a Starfleet official named Robespierre, and the ship’s utility bot, Dunsel. Everyone piles into the jumper and launch, only to be caught by the black hole’s gravitational pull. The Enterprise uses its tractor in an attempt to reel in the jumper while, on the bridge, the crew must decide what to do about the two life signs in the mercenary shuttle headed for the event horizon.
The Enterprise escapes the black hole’s gravitational pull by using the deflector array to project a counter-field ahead of the ship and then jumping to warp.
You set off for the rendezvous point and your guests settle in: no-nonsense Lucinda, meek Milo, officious Robespierre and, of course, the bombastic Harven Zax.
While Data works on repairing Dunsel the robot, you check in on the mercenaries you beamed off the doomed shuttle headed towards the black hole’s event horizon. They offer to talk in exchange for their freedom. Instead, you have Garak chat with the alien mercenary, Algernon. In his own incomparable fashion, the simple Cardassian tailor convinces the merc to talk and reveal he and his partner were in the employ of a Klingon Great House who want Harven Zax for a secret he carries. Algernon also reveals that he and Mira were given coordinates to the damaged cruiser transporting Zax. But Garak finds this mysterious. The cruisers engines failed without warning. So how did anyone know where to find it?
Suddenly, the Enterprise shudders and slows. Data reveals the ship’s nacelles are encrusted with glittering green growth that turns out to be a subspace organism that feeds on warp fields. Everyone retreats to a shielded section of the ship as a baryon sweep clears the organisms, then the crew directs focus to their passengers, engaging them in conversation to learn more about their mission. Harven Zax simply talks about himself while Robespierre laments the fact he has been passed over for promotion three times. Milo demonstrates impressive understanding of the Ancients in his conversation with Daniel Jackson, and Aeryn Sun identifies Lucinda as a fellow ex-military. But the most notable piece of information comes from Dunsel who, it turns out, had his memory stores deleted after discovering that someone had sabotaged the cruiser, forcing the ship out of warp and into the hands of the waiting mercs. One of their passengers is a mole, and the crew must decide how to proceed.
The crew attempts to lure the mole into a trap by revealing they will successfully restore Dunsel’s memory stores by morning. But, rather than taking the bait, the mole springs their own trap. The Enterprise drops out of warp and goes dark. A beacon onboard the ship is broadcasting their position and a mysterious vessel is fast-approaching.
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